Black Lives Matter, Summer 2016: Sterling/Castile/Robinson--

Union Square, July 7, 2016
Photo © by Jack Mirkinson 

UPDATE: Tragedy begets tragedy...last night in Dallas, Texas, during a peaceful protest against the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, a gunman or gunmen ambushed and shot five police personnel dead, and wounded 7 others. Also injured were two civilians, including a mother who was trying to shield her son from the bullets. Police officials identified the gunman, a 25-year-old African American US Army reserve member and veteran, Micah Xavier Johnson. The shooter allegedly was angered by the killing of black people and wanted to target white police officers in retribution.

After a standoff with police, they sent in a bomb squad robot, armed with an explosive device, and killed him. Police and social media had initially misidentified the gunman as an African American man who had who was openly carrying his registered weapon. (This begs the question of whether open-carry and concealed weapon laws do not apply to or for African Americans, Latinxs, and others, and only for white people.)

I mourn the deaths of these officers, and continue to grieve for the people I list below who were killed by the police or in police custody. The answer is not more violence, but an end to it all, and if that means that we have to rethink and then rebuild the very foundations of this society, built on domination, violence and oppression, then we must do it. But peacefully. And that means we have to begin by addressing one of the root problems in all of these deaths: guns, and their easy availability in the US.

On and on and on it goes. State-sanctioned police murders of black people. Veterans, lunch room workers, fathers, daughters, loved ones, people seeking medical help. Supply the category and someone searching through the roster of those slain can find a name to fit. This has occurred my entire life, in various forms, usually leading to marches and protests, calls for accountability and legal and technological changes, prosecutions of the police (which rarely happens), and occasionally, as happened in Ferguson and Baltimore, as in Miami and other cities in the past, uprisings. It is no less painful to witness, to live through today than it was when I was a child or teenager.

These last few weeks, these last few days, have filled with the names of the newly dead: Alton Sterling in Louisiana. Philando Castile in Minnesota. Angelo Brown and Stephanie Hicks in Illinois. Darius Robinson in Oklahoma. As the Guardian's statistics show, over 566 people have been killed by cops or while in police custody this year. The Huffington Post points out that 136 black people have died at the hands of cops. The highest rate in 2016, 3.4 per 1 million people, is among Native Americans, with African Americans dying at only slightly lower frequency at 3.23 per 1 million people. As horrifying as last year's numbers were, this year's should give us pause to reflect, and a charge to act.

I've written on here before about how these deaths represent a slow genocide playing out before our eyes--or some of our eyes--and how what these state-sanctioned killings, which mirror the state's brutality elsewhere in the world, underline again and again, as the Black Lives Matter movement has pointed out, is how dehumanized and disposable black people--and brown people--remain in this society, a fact that not only the Donald Trump campaign's imagery, rhetoric and surrounding discourse testify to on a regular basis, but also the toothless responses from Democrats and Republicans alike. (As BREXIT, the rise of the nationalist right in Europe, the Brazilian coup and state-sanctioned police killings there of black youth and teenagers, the fanatics in the Middle East, and so on make clear, the same could be said for the globe as a whole.)

While technology has allowed witnesses to these state killings to record and broadcast via social media imagery of what occurred, offering proof to what has too long been viewed by people not directly affected as mere anecdote or exaggeration and creating documentation, as well as a space for witness, memorialization and mourning, I also think that the subsequent hyper-circulation and replaying, as the news media often do, of the deaths can habituate and inure us to the deaths of these victims and magnify the suffering their loved ones feel, while only increasing the centuries long trauma at the core of this society. We have to look directly at what is happening, but to the extent possible, avoid turning these tragedies into spectacle. Moreover, they attest that our melancholia and fear are not groundless; it arises from the danger and blood that saturates the very ground we walk on every day. Many of us rightly fear that we are a cop's bullet or baton away from becoming a meme and statistic.

These deaths also underpin the ironic force and truth at the core of the statement that cannot be proclaimed enough, "Black Lives Matter." That this statement of affirmation has been turned inside out points to the perverse social and political logic in which we live. Like the deaths, the iconic phrase, and the movement that has arisen around it, demands that we realize and act upon the truth in the statements STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE & STOP KILLING US!

Here is a powerful poem by Jericho Brown that captures the horror and tragedy of these state-sanctioned killings and deaths in a way that only poetry can. The poem is called "Bullet Points," and I have borrowed it from Buzzfeed, where I first saw it. The copyright is Jericho's and Buzzfeed's.

The Murder of Walter Scott

Here we go again.

In this April 4, 2015, frame from video provided by Attorney L. Chris Stewart representing the family of Walter Lamer Scott, Scott appears to be running away from City Patrolman Michael Thomas Slager, right, in North Charleston, S.C. Slager was charged with murder Tuesday, hours after law enforcement officials viewed the dramatic video that appears to show Slager shooting a fleeing Scott several times in the back. (AP Photo/Courtesy of L. Chris Stewart)

Walter Lamar Scott was murdered in North Charleston, South Carolina, by white cop Michael T. Slager. Slager had pulled Scott over for a traffic violation, a broken tail-light, and when Scott fled, Slager initially tried to Taser him.

When that failed, Slager shot Scott dead, in cold blood, in the back, eight times. 

For a traffic stop. A traffic stop. A traffic stop.

Scott was not armed. Scott was not armed. Walter Scott. Was. Not. Armed.

Slager then apparently handcuffed the corpse of the man he had just killed and attempted to plant his Taser on him, with the apparent assistance of a fellow cop, a black man. Despite his attempted cover-up, a now-surfaced video belies it.

Unlike many cops in his position, he has been fired, and is being charged--though whether he will be prosecuted and convicted remains to be seen--with murder.

Again and again and again this keeps happening, because even though we repeat that "Black Lives Matter," in reality in this country, in this society, on this globe, what we see is that they do not.

As Jason Parham notes on Gawker, last month alone, 36 black people were killed by police, or roughly one every 21 hours. This approximates a slow and almost shameless form of genocide.

More Black Americans were killed by cops in 2014 than the total number of black people who died in the 9/11 attacks.

Like Parham I want to write something more thoughtful, more insightful, something illuminating, but I am exhausted. I really am. I have lived this reality all of my life, now approach 50 years. The foreground changes but the backdrop of racism, white supremacy, black disposability and social death, and state violence allied to elite social and economic interests are the same. Yes, things have improved, always as a result of sustained struggle, since I was a child, and they continue to improve, but we still have a long way to go.

These state murders are occurring as this country warehouses vast numbers of black and brown people in prisons, many of them privatized and providing cheap labor for corporations and earning dividends for investors. Countless black and brown people--children, adolescents, women, men--cycle through the failed penal system and its prison industrial complex annex, sometimes as a prelude to be murdered, at some point in their lives and usually with impunity, by the state, which does everything to protect elite interests, global corporations, and the billionaires who are destroying this country piece by piece.

It has to end. It MUST END.

No amount of telling black people how to behave, whether around officers or otherwise, no amount of "diversity training," no amount of explaining away the disparate ways that black americans (and brown americans who are treated like black americans by this system) are treated by the law and its officers, no amount of appeals to "black on black violence," divorced from the larger social context or not, no rationalizing away or ignoring all the ways in which black people in this society pay extensive social, political and economic taxes just for being black, is going to do it.

What has to happen is that cops have to stop killing unarmed black americans, and when they do they have to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Cops have to stop serving as the shock troops of white supremacy, neo-colonialism, the plutonomy and global capitalism. THEY MUST STOP KILLING US. What has to happen is that the entire foundation and edifice upon which this society has been built and developed has to be addressed, rethought, and remade. This is not an interpersonal issue. It is a systemic and structural problem. And it has to be addressed and redressed.

NOW.